Accessible WordPress Themes: Easier Than You Think

This is a summarized rewrite of an interview with Jessica Lyschik about making WordPress themes accessible. Jessica, a longtime WordPress community member and accessibility advocate, explains why accessibility in themes is more achievable than many developers imagine and offers practical steps to get started.

Why accessibility matters

Accessibility is both a moral obligation and, increasingly, a practical necessity. Beyond legal and regulatory pressure, making sites accessible broadens your audience, can improve sales, and prepares your sites for new technologies. Jessica highlights that AI agents and automated tools interact with sites more like assistive technologies do — they depend on correct, semantic HTML and clear structure. If your site is built correctly, these agents can read and act on content more reliably.

A personal, gradual journey

Jessica’s path into accessibility was gradual: she learned over years, made mistakes, and kept improving. Her advice: treat accessibility as a habit. If you bake accessibility into design and development from the start, it avoids time-consuming retrofits later.

Why themes matter

Themes shape site structure and how users experience content. WordPress themes in the repository can get an accessibility-ready tag if they meet specific requirements. Those requirements are helpful but can read as cryptic; Jessica recommends clearer, more technical documentation to connect each requirement to concrete implementation steps. Today only a small fraction of repository themes carry the accessibility-ready tag, so there is room to improve awareness and adoption.

Block themes vs classic themes

Block themes generally make accessibility easier. WordPress core handles many accessibility details when you use proper blocks and template parts. Examples: skip-to-content links, the main HTML tag on groups, form fields such as search and comments — core often provides correct labels and structure automatically. Classic themes require more manual work to achieve the same results.

Low-hanging fruit: quick wins you can do now

• Use semantic HTML: header, main, footer, section, aside. If you know basic HTML and CSS, you can map those elements to the theme structure. In block themes this is often just a matter of assigning the right block or template part.
• Add alternative text for every meaningful image: this one is simple and has immediate impact. In classic themes use the media library alt field; in block editors alt text is visible when you insert images.
• Provide skip-to-content links: block themes can enable this automatically by assigning the main tag to a group block. For classic themes add a visible, focusable skip link that jumps to the main content.
• Ensure controls have accessible names: icon-only buttons need aria-labels or visible text. This is often a quick fix but essential for screen reader users.
• Use a correct heading hierarchy: H1, then H2, then H3, etc. Avoid skipping heading levels. This helps screen reader navigation and SEO.
• Underline links where helpful: making links visually distinct is low-effort CSS but improves usability.

Practical workflow advice

Make accessibility part of your theme foundation. Fixing accessible markup in a shared header or template part saves repeated work across pages and sites. If you discover accessibility issues late, retrofitting can feel like a chore; designing with accessibility up front prevents that pain.

WordPress accessibility-ready tag and requirements

The accessibility-ready tag requires meeting around 18 requirements that map to accessibility principles (a subset of WCAG). Requirements include appropriate HTML structure, form field labeling, and an accessibility.txt file describing what was implemented and any helper CSS classes for screen-reader-only content. Themes can still be submitted to the repository without this tag, but the tag signals explicit effort and testing. Because only a small percentage of themes currently hold the tag, Jessica recommends improving documentation and education rather than forcing compliance overnight.

AI agents and future considerations

AI agents, which may act on behalf of users, rely on machine-readable structure rather than visual cues. Proper semantic markup, labels, and consistent structure make it easier for agents to interact with shopping flows, forms, and navigation. Thinking about accessibility thus also prepares sites for broader automation and improved user experiences.

Who to learn from

Jessica follows accessibility experts inside and outside the WordPress community. A few names she mentioned include Joe Dolson, Rian Rietveld, Amber Hinds (Equalize Digital), Sara Soueidan, and other accessibility speakers. She recommends pairing official standards (WCAG) with practical tutorials, talks, and example-based guidance since specs can be dense.

Final thoughts

Accessibility is manageable when you break it down: learn a few key practices, adopt them into theme templates, and share those patterns with your team. It is an interdisciplinary concern: content authors, designers, SEO specialists, and developers all play a role. Start with the easy wins — semantic elements, alt text, skip links, labels — and build from there. Over time these practices become second nature and save time while making the web usable for many more people.